Monthly Archives: August 2009

Writing something about the value of humans versus animals is a perilous undertaking.  But lets give it a go away.

Michael Vick signed a contract to play for the Philadelphia Eagles, pro football team. Vic, recently released from prison,  served  time for killing a number of dogs.   Vick’s actions here were reprehensible.  But the man is being pilloried in the newspapers, and people are carrying signs at the Eagle’s preseason football camp condemning his actions and insisting he not be allowed to play football. While this is going on, practicing with his football team, is a player recently given a two month sentence for having been convicted of DUI vehicular homicide.    Vick’s sentence was for  23 months.  Not infrequently, players are found guilty of beating up their wives/girlfriends and return to play with no concurrent uproar.    There is a lack of  perspective here.

Which brings me to another news item from the blog “Green Hell” that also shows a lack of perspective.

Exxon has been fined for causing the death of 85 protected waterfowl, hawks and owls.  The birds had ventured near reserve pits and waste water storage facilities. Exxon’s total cost could be considered to be about $3.1 million for the 85 birds or $36,470 per bird death.  The blog compares that cost to what our service men receive, “the death gratuity” of $12,420 for active duty and $100,000 for combat deaths.

The response by “papiertigre”  to Steve Miloy’s Green Hell blog was so good, it is added as follows in its entirety.

papiertigre Says:

August 19, 2009 at 3:09 pm

Come on Steve. Everybody knows that a raptor’s life is worth a million sub-Saharan Africans catching malaria.
So of course a raptor’s death will be priced at just under 3 times as much as a soldier’s.

But what I’m wondering is why are windmills in Altamont killing 4.7k birds, actually chopping their feathery heads off, without any financial repercussion?

http://baynature.org/articles/jan-mar-2009/altamont-power-struggle

The Altamont, a major migratory corridor, hosts large raptor populations, including one of the world’s highest densities of breeding golden eagles. When wind turbines were installed here in the 1980s, their blades’ lethal effects were little known. But for more than 25 years, Altamont’s 5,400 turbines have been killing up to 4,700 birds annually–as many as 1,300 of them raptors.

25 times 4,700 times $36,470 equals
————————————–
$4 billion 285 million 225 thousand and 000
dollars and cents.

Pay up suckers.

Seriously, we have precidence here. Established law. What do they call it?

Oh yes Stari desisis.

Cbdakota

Representative Sestak

Thank you for responding to my email requesting that you vote against passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) otherwise known as cap and trade.   You chose to vote for passage.  You have responded with a 19 page letter attempting to justify your “yes” vote.   You have the right to vote as you believe, but your vote for passage indicates that you have been misinformed and the content of the19 page letter makes that very clear.

In your letter, you outline what you want to do for your constituents, and in part say “…provide them the honorable and enthusiastic service they deserve.”   You have failed the honorable part of your pledge.    The Cap and Trade bill, in the view of most observers, is the largest tax bill ever to have passed the House of Representatives.    And you voted for it without having read it and without having a comprehensive understanding of impact.   The bill was 1400-1500 pages long, of which the last 300 pages were added within hours of the vote for passage.  Even if you were to eventually vote for passage of the bill, the honorable thing would have been to vote against it until it was properly understood.   And the Committee Chairman  Waxman may think engaging a speed reader was smart and clever,  but you can be sure that your not  protesting such a travesty was not honorable.

SUMMARY OF MY COMMENTS  ON YOUR LETTER

• You begin your letter by saying that imported oil is the main problem.  This is odd as ACES  primarily focuses on electricity.   Very little oil is used to produce electricity.  But if you wish to talk about crude oil,  lets do so.
• You say that the US is without a comprehensive energy policy.  You have my agreement here.   But ACES does not improve our security but rather it jeopardizes it.
• You say you want to reduce the amount of foreign crude oil used in the US.   If so, the best way to do that is to let our petroleum industry develop our Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and ANWR oil fields.  We have four times more oil in these fields than we do in the fields we are presently allowed to produce.
• Russian, China, Brazil, Spain and Norway are obtaining  OCS oil drilling leases from Cuba and the Bahamas.  In some cases the drilling will be less than 90 miles from the US.
• The Democrats and the militant environmentalists say that it will take 10 years to develop those fields.   But Brazil is bringing in a large off-shore field in some 24 months.
• Analysis shows that most of the 120 months that is typical in the US is due to government bureaucracy and environmental law suits.
• It is unlikely that renewable energies such as wind and solar are able to  make a significant contribution to our country’s energy needs.
• What contribution they do make will come at a very high cost as these technologies are only viable with heavy subsidies.  The subsidies and support provided in 2007 to the various energy sources, according to the Energy Information Administration in $/megawatthour were as follows:  Coal –$0.44, Natural Gas–$0.25, Nuclear–$1.59, Wind–$23.37, and Solar–$24.34.
• The objective of ACES is to artificially reduce the use of fossil fuels that currently supply 87% of the US energy in the name of cutting back the amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere. But rather than immediately beginning rationing, (on a bill that had to be passed so quickly that you did not have time to read it.), ACES excluded 85% of the targeted users of fossil fuels for 10 years!!
• The economic analysis saying that the cost to the citizens is  “only the price of a postage stamp a day” is bogus on several counts.
  • That analysis is largely for the period before the major restrictions on fossil fuel use begin.
  • Even then, the analysis ignored the effect on GDP.  According to GlobalWarming.org. “The CBO study ignores the impact of cap-and-trade on GDP, which is like trying to calculate a baseball player’s batting average without including singles or doubles.”
• The Heritage Foundation, The Brookings Institute and The Black Chamber of Commerce, to name a few, believe the cost in dollars and lost jobs will be very high if ACES becomes law.
• The jobs lost due to the economy killing high energy prices and the flight of our manufacturing industry to China,  India, Brazil and Russia where there will be no restrictions on fossil fuel use will be much greater than the few “green” jobs created by this bill.
• The only green jobs that are certain are government jobs.   ACES is such a massive regulatory invasion in our lives that it will require thousands perhaps hundred of thousands to manage. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the cost of these regulators will be $8 billion over the next ten years.
• Most of the companies you cite in your letter as supporters of ACES, see their profit position versus their competitors improving through legislation that forces fossil fuel prices to rise and/or the sale and trading of CO2 offsets.
• In recent years, the alarmists by and large have stopped bring up this old saw that global warming would cause an increase in heat related deaths.    The reason is that the cause of most weather related deaths is as a result of cold.  As testified by Bjorn Lomborg, “It can be estimated that every year more than 200,000 people die from excess heat in Europe.   It is reasonable to estimate that each year about 1.5 million people die from excess cold in Europe.   This is more than seven times the total number of heat deaths.”
• The global warmers say that we should bet our nation’s economy on the output of their climate computers that have been largely off target from the get-go.  Climate computers make “forecasts” but not “science”.  Water vapor is the major greenhouse gas.  Not CO2.  The warmers don’t deny the preceding. But their computers say little increases in temperature caused by CO2 cause big increases in water vapor going into the atmosphere.  This is a positive feedback which mother nature typically abhors.  The clincher is that they can not demonstrates that this actually happens.
• The jobs of thousands of Pennsylvanians working in or associated with the coal industry will be lost because of ACES legislation.
• Your premise that restricting CO2 emissions will save the world from some disaster (computer predicted),  is unlikely to work as CO2 is not the primary reason for warming.   Unfortunately ACES will be the cause of a disaster alright, but it will be economic.

DISCUSSION

In your letter’s 4^th paragraph you say “For too long, this country has been without a comprehensive energy policy.”    We certainly agree on this point.   We have year by year increased the amount of foreign crude oil we import. Further, over those years the nation has sent untold billions of dollars to many countries that are not particularly friendly with us. And last year, when the supply got tight, the price of gasoline, rose to $4 per gallon.   You are right, our energy policy does not seem to be working.   The American Clean Energy and Security Act,  does nothing to make our energy policy cogent, and it  does not improve our security but rather jeopardizes it.   It seems odd that in your letter, you emphasize the need to reduce our nation’s use of crude oil, when ACES is clearly directed at the electrical utilities where crude oil is hardly used at all.  But lets discuss how we could really help improve our security.

It isn’t that we don’t have domestic crude oil.   The US  supplies about 40% of the our own crude oil needs from fields estimated to contain 25 billion barrels.  According to The US Geological Survey, there are other very large reserves that the US has.  That organization says that we have some 86 billion barrels of oil in the outer continental shelf (OCS).  In addition to that,  ANWR  is said to have reserves of 10 billion barrels.   The Baaken field in the Northern Plains is estimated to contain nearly 4 billion barrels—and there are estimates that the as yet unproven that Three Forks-Spanish formation may have equally as large reserves.  But OCS and ANWR are off limits because of environmental objections.  Just think how much better off we would be if we were allowed to produce the other 100 billion barrels reserves which are about four times greater than those reserves that we are allowed to use.    Robert Samuelson, in a Newsweek article titled THE BIAS AGAINST OIL AND GAS, says “Expanding any fossil-fuel production offends many Americans.  But policies placating this prejudice aren’t in our national interest.”  Read more here.

The Institute for Energy Research wrote to then President Bush urging him to increase domestic supplies by immediately repealing the Presidential Executive Order that established a moratorium on OCS energy production.  They wrote,

“Because of these outdated bans, more than 97 percent of our nation’s vast OCS remains fallow, with less than 3 percent being leased for energy production. We believe it self-destructive and immoral for us, as a nation to continue  to allow our consumers to suffer the economic consequences of government policies that deliberately restrict access to energy supplies.  The consequences of the OCS moratoria have been devastating to American energy security.  We are the only advanced country in the world that ties its own hands behind its back with such a policy.  Brazil, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia and Norway are all examples of advanced nations and allies that do not restrict their own energy production.   Americans are suffering unnecessarily.”

President Bush responded by removing the barriers.  But the Obama Administration has re-imposed so many restrictions that no US energy company can afford to move forward to tap these vast resources.   And get this, Cuba and the Bahamas have signed deals with China, India, Russia, Brazil,  Spain,  and Norway to begin exploratory drilling in the Caribbean .   From Keysnet.com:

“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Russians could drill closer to our shores than American oil and gas companies? The losers would be the American consumers who are cut off from the trillions of dollars in government revenue and thousands of new jobs that could be created if more of America’s oil and natural gas resources could be developed,” Katie Matusic, media relations manager for the oil industry lobbying group American Petroleum Institute, wrote in an e-mail.   Read more here.

It would make most Americans mad if they were to learn that our government is letting others have this oil. Here again the mainstream media is covering for the radical environmentalists as I have yet to read about this in my local newspapers or hear it on TV.   The BBC, in an 29 July entry reported that  Russia is planning to drill off Cuba.  And the BBC added:

Russia is to begin oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, after signing a deal with Cuba, says Cuban state media. The Cuban state media are reporting this so it’s not a secret.   Read more here.

The Democrats have another strategy that says, well it will take 10 years to bring on the production and that is too late.   This is false on several levels.    Brazil has tapped a large OCS field and they are on schedule to have it producing oil in 24 months.  Why then do we have to take 120 months?   A Reasononline entry explains  why it takes so long in the United States.

“In Anchorage last month, Marilyn Crockett, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, explained to me the following time frame for ANWR drilling: Expect 12 months or more for an Environmental Impact Statement after Congress approves drilling. And this is working fast.  It would likely take much longer.  Expect 12 to 18 months for the Department of Interior to draw up and bid out the lease-sale process.  Plan on two years for the oil companies to test drilling and analysis. Drilling and transport of heavy equipment can only be done in the winter months when the permafrost ground is solidly frozen, from December through April. Concurrently with oil drilling, a 75 mile pipeline spur needs to be built to connect to the main Alyeska pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to the Southern shipping port..  However, this time frame does not allow for environmental lawsuits ‘every step of the way’ as Crockett warned.  The rest of the 10 year time frame is to allow for lawsuits trying to prevent or harass production in one way or another. “

So, the majority of the time needed is due to government bureaucracy and the militant environmentalists.   If Congress were really serious about reducing oil imports, they could make it happen.  But the extreme environmentalists have them by some body part and are making them toe their green line .

The second reason why the “its always too late to drill” not valid is that the oil import situation is going to get worse long before it gets better.   The demand for energy is not going to go away.   India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, etc want to bring their less developed nation’s population up to standards comparable to those that developed nations have.   They have categorically stated they are going to continue to use fossil fuels irrespective of what Europe, the US and Japan think.  As the price for manufacturing in the US skyrockets due to the rationing of lower cost fossil fuel forcing us to use high priced “renewable fuels” we will see our manufacturing sector leave for more economically friendly shores.   And the jobs will go to those countries.   It is laughable that there seems to be people who believe that these nations will give in and join us in the folly of rationing fossil fuels.  Read here to disabuse yourself of the idea that these nations are going to change their minds.

The objective of ACES is to artificially reduce the use of fossil fuels  that currently supply 87% of the US energy in the name of cutting back the amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere. But rather than immediately beginning rationing, (on a bill that had to be passed so quickly that you did not have time to read it.)  ACES  excluded 85% of the targeted users of fossil fuels for 10 years. You agreed to that because you know that the consequence of rationing fossil fuels will dramatically increase the price of energy.   Yet you use the fiction that it wont cost more than a postage stamp a day.   Can it be that you actually don’t know how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) arrived that figure?  The CBO admits that it ignores economic costs such as the decrease in GDP.  Globalwarming.org reports:

“The CBO study ignores the impact of cap-and-trade on GDP, which is like trying to calculate a baseball player’s batting average without including singles or doubles”.  The Institute for Energy Research examined the CBO’s approach said  “There are several major flaws with the CBO’s approach, but perhaps the most outrageous example of sleight of hand is the CBO’s focus on after-tax income.  Because Waxman-Markey will raise prices more than incomes, households will necessarily become poorer.  This will push households into lower tax brackets—and thus have lower tax liabilities to the tune of roughly $8.7 billion.  Normal people would consider this to be a downside of Waxman-Markey.  CBO is not normal.  It considers this $8.7 billion as an addition to total household income—money from heaven! –and goes on celebrating the effect of this policy without saying a thing about the cause.”  For a thorough review of the how the real costs are disguised read   here

Again,if energy price increases were not going to result, why did the bill offer 85% of the fossil fuel use permits for free  over the next ten years.

The WebMemo of the Heritage Foundation summed up their and other estimates of what ACES would more likely cost.  Heritage says for the time frame of 2012 through 2035 projects that there will be 2.5 million jobs less than there would be without ACES.  The average GDP loss will be $393billion hitting a high of $662 billion in 2035.    Brookings Institution, a liberal leaning organization, projects personal income loss of $1 to 2 trillion in present value.  They say that the 2050 GDP would be 2.5 % lower and unemployment 1.7million jobs more than it would be without ACES.  The National Black Chamber of Commerce found in 2015 the GDP would be 1% ($170billion) lower because of ACES.  They found GDP lower in 2030 to be $350 billion below and in 2050 GDP to be $730 billion lower because of ACES.

The making of green jobs is likely to come at a very high cost to the consumer.  The cost of the renewables  has been shown to be about nearly twice as high as conventional fossil fuel units.  The levelized cost of renewables according to the Energy Information Office (EIA) is much higher than fossil fuel technologies.

Levelized Cost of New Generating Capacity

Source  EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009 (revised) April 2009

Levelized Costs represent the present value of the total cost of building and operating a generating plant over its financial life, converted to equal annual payments and amortized over expected annual generation from an duty cycle.

Solar PV is a system that uses photovoltaic cells to generate electricity.  Solar thermal is a system where the sun rays are concentrated and steam is produced to run turbines to produce electricity.

Capacity factor is the availability of the system to generate electricity at its rated capacity.  Standard coal, natural gas and nuclear facilities have high capacity factors.  Wind and solar have low capacity factors.  The sun is only available for half of the  time and the angle at which the sun strikes the solar collectors and  the amount of cloud cover have an effect on ability to produce at full capacity.   Electrical distribution systems cannot schedule wind power because the wind may or may not be blowing when the schedule calls for increase production.   Wind availability on the really cold days has proved to be a problem in some instances.

The Federal subsidies that the principal energy sources and the renewable energy sources are illustrated on the following table. The data is for 2007 and does not include and State of local subsidies.

These figures may drop some as the experience curve gets longer.  But the fact remains that wind and solar are nearly impossible for the electrical distributor to schedule for dispatching, make it necessary that a backup facility must be kept in hot standby to fulfill electrical commitments when the sun is not shining nor the wind blowing.   An electrical storage (batteries e.g.) system must be developed that can store power generated by wind and solar to give these systems an apparent higher system capacity.  Moreover, the still undiscovered storage system must be cost effective.  This problem is detailed here, here, here, here,

Without subsidies and without that undiscovered cost effective invention,  renewable energy sources will not be competitive with fossil fuels for a very long time and their growth will be limited.   But since ACES does not want to let the market decide when they should replace fossil fuels, an honest government ought not be telling their citizens that this change over will be only a postage stamp a day.

The green job creation is going to be costly and as noted in the preceding at the cost of other jobs.  The concept behind the creation of green jobs is that force wind, solar, etc into the economy via raising fossil fuel prices and ultimately  prohibiting fossil fuel use.   The Energy Tribune posted an article titled

“Green Jobs: Fast-tracking Economic Suicide”.  The following is from that positing:   “Creating ex nihilo – literally, out of nothing – used to be a theological concept, God’s prerogative. Today it seems, President Obama and certain Western politicians claim to possess the ability to do it. Against all the laws of economics and the marketplace, President Obama and others believe they can create millions of “green” jobs ex nihilo, literally, out of thin air, via cap and trade.

“The basic assumption is that technology per se generates jobs. Mostly, it does not. Rather, technology enables jobs – real and sustainable jobs – based on how useful the technology is to the marketplace. To generate real industrial jobs, however, you need a basic commodity to trade, such as oil, gas or coal. Yet green politicians and eco-lobbyists expect to create a revolution in green jobs based on alternative energy sources. The trouble is that alternative energy technologies currently don’t work. That is to say, they remain inefficient, offering a very poor energy return on investment. Cut off the flow of public subsidies and the alternative energy industrial revolution would grind to a halt tomorrow – as the European experience already bears out.”

And:

“President Obama maintains his planned 5 million new jobs will cost the taxpayer $30,000 per job. Bad enough, we might think. But The Center for American Progress, whose CEO headed-up Obama’s transition team, calculates it would take government spending of $100 billion to create 2 million green jobs. That’s a cost to the taxpayer of $50,000 to create a single green job. The Apollo Alliance, whose founder served on Obama’s campaign, calculates it would take $500 billion to create 5 million jobs. That’s a mere $100,000 per green job created.”

“Real and sustainable industrial jobs are market-led, technology-aided; not state-subsidized, technology-inefficient. Real jobs are rooted in trading a material commodity, not created ex nihilo.”

The only green jobs that are certain are government jobs.   ACES is such a massive regulatory invasion in our lives that it will require thousands perhaps hundred of thousands to manage.   CBO estimates that the cost of these regulators will be $8 billion over the next ten years.   see here. The American Enterprise Institute had this to say about the expansion of government roles:

“ Much of the discussion thus far has been concerned with the typical disputes over estimates of the cost of such a program, but there has been little notice of how an approach that is supposed to be an alternative to command-and-control regulation will involve a massive interagency bureaucracy to execute it, with undoubtedly substantial compliance costs for the private sector. Waxman-Markey contemplates a primary administrative role for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); the bill requires the EPA’s administrator to perform over six hundred tasks in connection with the operation of the law. One wonders whether the EPA administrator will have time for any other environmental issues.

The bill also creates primary administrative roles for the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, along with substantial involvement of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There are also multiple planning and reporting mandates for state governments. It is impossible to tally up the total number of new tasks Waxman-Markey is asking the government to perform (several general clauses will no doubt generate additional functions beyond those specifically enumerated), but the coordination and consultation requirements for the responsibilities of all these agencies promise a bonanza for lawyers and consultants and endless interagency meetings that will keep the chairs warm in countless conference rooms.”

ACES told the EPA not to do one task.  That task was the evaluation of ethanol and other biofuels in an effort to determine if they were net contributors to CO2 emissions to the atmosphere.   It’s a good thing they did that because the first finding of the EPA was that biofuels were net contributors, and of course that could not be left on the table.   Thus the farmers were excluded from having to contribute to reduction of CO2.

Representative Sestak,  you stated that many ”companies understood the importance of comprehensive climate change legislation to their economic success and they shared their commitment to taking the steps necessary to invest in technology and practices to reduce the emissions of green house gasses. “  Their support of  “comprehensive climate legislation” is not motivated by some altruistic urge but rather the desire to increase their profits. I find nothing wrong with companies making a profit, but please don’t be naïve about why they are supporting ACES.  You note that Exelon’s CEO supports ACES.  Sometime ago I purchased Exelon stock based on how well they perform when the price of fossil fuels goes up.   Quoting from The Energy Tribune article titled

“Go Nuclear, and Get Rich”:   “On Friday, during the CERAWeek conference in Houston, MIT professor Andrew Kadak provided a graphic that showed the share price performance of electric utilities that rely on nuclear power versus utilities that rely primarily on fossil fuels. The nuclear utilities included in the survey — Constellation, Entergy, Exelon, and PG&E – bested their fossil-fueled counterparts by a wide margin. Through April 2008, the shares of the nuclear utilities rose by about 286 percent.”

Most of the companies you cite in your letter, see their profit position versus their competitors improving through legislation that forces fossil fuel prices to rise and/or the sale and trading of CO2 offsets.

It is disappointing to see in your letter the grossly exaggerated temperature predictions that one study at MIT produced.  The more the theory of man-made of catastrophic climate change is debunked, the more alarming the computer projections become.

I have assumed that your background, Naval Academy, would have required you to study science.  If you did, one would expect that you would immediately have recognized that climate computers make “forecasts” but not “science”.   It would have been evident to you that these computers have been wrong on nearly everything they have tried to predicted.  And with some technical background, your study would have convinced you that the dynamics of the climate systems are so complex,  there is much question if these computers will ever have the ability to make accurate prediction.  In spite of this, you approved of legislation that is based on these computers forecasts.  Would you bet a month’s pay that the weather forecast ten days out would be accurate?  Yet you are willing to bet the US economy on forecasts 40 years!! out.  Another way to think about this would be to wonder why the computers did not forecast the dropping global temperatures during this decade.   This drop is occurring at the same time atmospheric CO2 content continues to rise.  Hence, no correlation.  So, science tells us that,  “no CO2-temperature correlation, no causation”.   The global warming theory is based upon the idea that little tweaks in atmospheric temperature  resulting from atmospheric CO2 will increase water vapor in the atmosphere.  A positive feedback making a little CO2  the agent that puts the main greenhouse gas, water vapor, into the atmosphere.    The proof of this theory of positive feedback rests upon their computer predictions of some sort of developing ‘hotspot’ in the atmosphere above the tropics. But when actually measured,  this “proof” does not exist.   read more here

But temperatures do respond to changes in the Sun’s activity over the centuries.  This seems to be in play at the present time.  The Sun is at a very low if not historical low level of activity.    Temperatures have been dropping.    By the way, not only are global atmospheric temperatures not marching upward in lock step with CO2 concentration, the ARGO program  (in service beginning in 2003) for measuring ocean temperature show the ocean temperatures to be falling as well.

Do you know anything about the history of the Union of Concerned Scientists?  If you did, you would probably be disinclined to use them as a source of scientific information.  From the blog  BayLedger News Zone:

That UCS is a highly partisan operation well funded by left-leaning foundations and Hollywood celebrities and happy to ignore established scientific methodologies for its own purposes-is apparently not newsworthy. The group has a long history of being just plain wrong on many scientific issues, and its current agenda conforms to the extremes of environmentalist ideology. Moreover, UCS is neither representative of the scientific community at large nor is it a gathering of top scientists. Instead, a cadre of senior staff whose credentials are steeped more in Washington policy-making than in scientific research rides herd over a grassroots membership from all walks of life. You too can be a Concerned Scientist for a new member fee of $35 !

True to its peacenik roots, UCS organized opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 1980s, fearing that it would push the world to war. But history showed otherwise. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would call Reagan’s decision to go ahead with SDI the “one vital factor in the ending of the Cold War.” UCS continues its anti-nuclear activism today.

The 1980s were not a good decade for the union’s predictive powers in other ways. In 1980, UCS claimed that “it is now abundantly clear that the world has entered a period of chronic energy shortages.” As is now abundantly clear, known energy reserves are higher than ever. Middle East oil reserves alone are estimated to have increased from 431 billion barrels in 1985 to 742 billion in 2005. Of course, if UCS achieved its stated aim of capping energy production from fossil fuel sources and closing down nuclear plants, then the world most certainly would face a major energy shortage today.

More recently, UCS has been consistently wrong in its stated concerns about genetically modified crops. In 1999, it publicized reports that corn modified with the natural pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is harmful to the monarch butterfly, findings that were subsequently rejected by NAS.  Read more here

In recent years, the alarmists by and large have stopped bring up this old saw that  global warming  would be causing an increase in heat related deaths.    Here’s why.  Bjorn Lomborg testified at a Congressional hearing on 21 March 2007 as follows:

Very often, we only hear about the heat deaths but not the cold deaths—-and sometimes this is even repeated in the official literature as in US 2005 Climate Change and Human Health Impacts report, where the heat was mentioned 54 times and cold just once.  We need to know just how much more heat deaths we can expect compared to how many fewer cold deaths.

Much has been made of the heat wave in Europe in early August 2003, which killed 35,000 people with 2000 deaths in the UK.  Yet, each year more than 25,000 people die in the UK from cold.   It can be estimated that every year more than 200,000 people die from excess heat in Europe.   It is reasonable to estimate that each year about 1.5 million people die from excess cold in Europe.   This is more than seven times the total number of heat deaths.  Just in this millennium Europe have lost more that 10 million people to the cold, 300 times the iconic 35,000 heat deaths from 2003.  That we so easily forget these deaths and so easily embrace the exclusive worry about global warming tells us of a breakdown in our sense of proportion.

He goes on to report:

A paper trying to incorporate all studies on this issue (a so-called meta-study) and apply it to a broad variety of settings both developed and developing around the world found that “global warming may cause a decrease in mortality rates, especially of cardiovascular diseases.  For the US, the net lower death count from global warming in 2050 is estimated at 174,000 per year.   See here for more of Lomborg’s testimony .

In Phoenix, very high temperatures occur.  Phoenix is a city with a large population of elderly people.  They seldom experience excess heat deaths.   As long as people have air conditioners this will continue to be the case……unless legislation is passed that will make it too costly for low income people to run their air conditioners.  Once again, ACES targets the poorest among us.

From a national standpoint,  coal is our most abundant fossil fuel resource and the US has the largest coal reserves in the World.  About 92% of the US coal is used to make electricity.  Over half of all the US electricity is produced by coal and because coal is available at very competitive prices,  the coal produced electricity is low cost.   ACES principally targets elimination of coal use.   Annually, sale of Pennsylvania coal has amounted to $1.5 billion.  There are thousands of Pennsylvania jobs at stake.   Coal miners and associated businesses will be disappear as a result of  ACES. Pennsylvania is the 4th largest producer of coal in the US.   The loss of jobs and revenue is predicated on the still unproven theory that CO2 is the main cause of global warming.

You are to be applauded for pushing for more thorium reactors research.  Still a long way to go before they are ready for prime time but they do have some promising features.  But most of your colleagues do not share your commitment to nuclear energy.   The barriers put up by the radical environmentalists to the use of nuclear power are disgraceful.    It seems clear that the people who want to reduce CO2 but not with the aid of nuclear power are not really environmentalists,   but something perhaps more sinister.  Even in ACES the requirement for a specific amount of renewable energy as part of every utilities offering, does not allow nuclear energy  nor Canadian hydropower to be counted.

Representative Sestak, you say that the American people know the meaning of sacrifice.  And because of this you believe they will rise up to meet the challenge.   But you are giving the people a false option. For 10,000+ years the globe has been warming and probably will continue to doing so—-we can hope—-as even a mini-ice age would be a real disaster.  However,  your premise that restricting CO2 emissions will save the world from some disaster (computer predicted),  is unlikely to work as CO2 is not the primary reason for warming. .   Unfortunately ACES will not avert a disaster, but be the cause of an economic disaster.

Being you were kind enough to append some material in the letter you mailed,  some additional material is appended to this letter.  Please examine A National Review Online entry titled “A Garden of Piggish Delights”, by Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson.   Quoting from their article,

“ We cannot cover every swirl and brushstroke of this masterpiece of misgovernance, but here’s a breakdown of its 50 most outrageous features.”   Read it here

CBDakota

The green movement is heavily invested in renewable energy and this will probably be a serious problem  for them in the years to come.   The likelihood is that the American people wont put up with severe energy shortages that result from rationing fossil fuels, banning nukes coupled with solar and wind renewable energy sources that are unable to satisfy demand.  Solar and wind face the inherent inability to be scheduled by the operators of the electrical grids.   Wind does not blow on schedule and the sun only shines, at best, half the time.

The Energy Tribune blog, features a story titled, “Texas Wind Power: The Numbers Versus the Hype”.  The nub of the story is that  the electrical grid operators in Texas say that  “just 8.7% of the installed wind capacity can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period for the next year.”  So they have to have conventional generating capacity to meet forecast loads.    Read more here. The wind power proponents agree that is true but say lots of the time they are on-line providing power, albeit not peak power, and if you look at what they actually provide, it amounts to about 30-40% of their installed capacity.    Well that does sound like it is better than the worst case,  but not much.

ERCOT the electrical grid operator in Texas has had some bad experiences.   Quoting  from Reuters: A drop in wind generation late on Tuesday, coupled with colder weather, triggered an electric emergency that caused the Texas grid operator to cut service to some large customers, the grid agency said on Wednesday. ERCOT said the grid’s frequency dropped suddenly when wind production fell from more than 1,700 megawatts, before the event, to 300 MW when the emergency was declared.   Read more here

And it seems some of the previously supportive companies are being to abandon the alterative energy arena.   Quoting from Planet Ark,    LONDON – Oil Major Royal Dutch Shell Plc doesn’t plan to make any more large investments in wind and solar energy in the future and does not expect hydrogen to play an important role in energy supply for some time.

“We do not expect material amounts of investment in those areas going forward,” Linda Cook, head of Shell’s gas and power unit told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. “They continue to struggle to compete with the other investment opportunities we have in our portfolio,” Cook said of solar and wind. Read more here.

Soon I will report on the subsidies given to Alternative Fuels.

And the folly of ignoring nuclear energy is explore here in a Heartland Article written by Dr Arthur Robinson.   This is a must read.   I wish that I could write as well as Dr Robinson.

Read his entry here

cbdakota

Today,  “Discover Magazine” arrived in the mail.   Last month they had 4 “experts” discuss global warming.   All were “warmers”.    In today’s issue,  two “letters to the editor” in response to that article were printed.   Both talked about the imbalance of that article where not even one person was representing the skeptic point of view.   The editor responded to those two letters saying that it was balanced because there aren’t any legitimate scientists or scientific groups that do not believe in man-made global warming.    Just so you don’t lose all hope when such an important magazine says we do not exist,  read about these non-existent German scientists who think like we do.   Read about  them here